If you're like me, you have a projects directory with many many entries in it.

I have over 200 in mine.

Some I've abandoned in a week, some even in a day.

I started feeling guilty about this and tried not to start projects unless I felt somewhat committed to them.

But you know what? After looking back on this decision, it was a bad one. I haven't done almost anything new recently, and I think this way of thinking is to blame. Now instead of just doing some work, I end up just daydreaming "gee, that might be a nice project".

Starting a project and hacking on some simple things is a perfectly valid way to think things through with it.

Often through actually doing this I realize some things which I had overlooked, which soon become very clear after working on it a bit. Had I only bounced the idea around in my head, I would never have gotten to the point of finding the reasons to reject it.

Only through actually doing some work on it do I force myself to REALLY think about it.

Looking at it like this, it is actually completely natural to abandon most projects at super early stages. While most are abandoned, some survive. All of the ones that ended up making money (such as Candy Japan) actually started their embryonic lives in hastily created project directories.

I will return to my habit of a lot of little project directories. This time guilt-free. Disk space is cheap.

This is the blog of Bemmu Sepponen, an expat living in Tokushima, Japan.